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Marxism

5 min read

Part of Ideas.

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Every episode (3)

Who argued it

Jonathan Butcher · John Judis · Joshua Muravchik

Socialism

Background

Marx and Engels as founders

Joshua Muravchik, author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism, told Bob Zadek that Karl Marx did not take the time to describe exactly how a socialist society might work, but said that once socialism arrived everyone would do just what they felt like, offering the example that he might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and write literary criticism in the evening. Muravchik said Marx and Engels believed socialism would produce super-abundance and create a “new man,” and he quoted Trotsky’s claim that under socialism every human being would have the creative powers of a Beethoven or a Goethe. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)

Muravchik described Engels as a brilliant promoter of Marx, while calling Marx himself a truly horrible person whose masterwork, Das Kapital, which he spent 16 years or more writing, is unreadable; Muravchik said no one has ever read it, more or less, and that Engels reviewed it 10 or 12 times under different pseudonyms. He also said Marx and Engels began as two young men who hated religion and set out to bring it down before arriving at communism, and that socialism functions as a substitute religion rather than merely a political idea. Socialism Reincarnated (2019)

Class conflict and collective ownership

In the episode with Williamson M. Evers, Zadek framed the discussion around capitalism as the system by which the world escaped universal poverty in 200 years, and Evers said the ethnic studies materials treat capitalism as a way of exploiting people that captures the surplus labor value of work and particularly oppresses racial minorities. Evers called this “vulgar Marxism” with a racial patina, imported from Marx and given a slight racial cast, and said it goes back to the late 1800s of Karl Marx and other wrong-headed socialists. California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020)

Evers added that the Jim Crow laws and segregation laws of the South were meant to prevent up-and-coming, striving blacks from competing against entrenched white interests, and that in their legal embodiment they blocked capitalism and competition. He compared the labor contractors who helped black workers reach jobs after the Civil War to electronic platforms that help Uber drivers meet Uber customers, and said the Jim Crow laws outlawed those contractors. California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum vs. Trump’s Patriotic Education (2020)

Critical Race Theory as applied Marxism

Jonathan Butcher, author of Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth, told Zadek that Critical Race Theory is rooted in Marxism. He quoted the law professor Angela Harris saying that Marxism’s dazzling analysis of capitalism and his conviction that the laws of historical materialism would bring on the revolution of the proletariat as inevitably as the sun rises are still riveting to contemporary theorists, and quoted Kimberlé Crenshaw saying that theorists are adding discussions of race to social justice and discussions of social justice to race. Butcher summarized the idea as taking Marx’s theory of conflict between classes, adding race to it, and applying it to everyday life. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)

Butcher said the original Critical Race theorists did not believe any bill or set of laws could rectify what they see as systemic racism, and that they argued with Critical Legal theorists who thought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would let America live up to its potential of providing equality under the law. He said Derrick Bell, the godfather of Critical Race Theory, wrote Faces at the Bottom of the Well, whose subtitle points at the permanence of racism, and that Marxism is at the heart of Critical Race Theory, so the American system must be taken apart. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)

Butcher traced the lineage to Germany in the 1920s, where a group of Marxists frustrated that the working class in Germany had not overthrown the system held what they called their first Marxist Work Week and created the Frankfurt School, an institute at the University of Frankfurt to discuss the future of Marxism and flesh out what became known as Critical Theory. He named Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, said they wanted to connect Marxism to culture and added Freudian ideas of relativism and the idea that there is no objective truth, and said they were chased out of Germany in 1937 by the Nazis and landed at Columbia University, at the Teachers College, where they disseminated their ideas in American higher education. Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022)

Across episodes: the same core, different fronts

The three episodes treat Marxism as one doctrine applied to different subjects. Muravchik, in 2019, presents it as a promise of heaven on earth and a substitute religion; Evers, in 2020, describes its appearance in California’s ethnic studies model curriculum as a vulgar Marxism with a racial cast; Butcher, in 2022, describes Critical Race Theory as Marxism with race added. The later treatments are more specific about the mechanism — the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and the Critical Legal theorists — while the earlier episode supplies the account of Marx and Engels themselves. No excerpt shows the guests disagreeing with one another.

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